It’s that time of year again – the SPIE Advanced Lithography Symposium in sunny San Jose, California (so far, it’s been raining constantly since I arrived). Attendance is expected to be about 4,000 again this year, with about 700 papers in five parallel conferences, and over 82,000 bottles of beer consumed (all right, I made that last number up).

As usual, I plan to blog each day about my impressions of the conference. It’s Sunday night, and I just finished teaching an 8 hour class (something I’ve been doing here for over 15 years) as a rolling start to the symposium. So it is with both tired feet and a sore voice that I’ll start off the conference tomorrow by attending the plenary session.

And I’m feeling nostalgic this year. In February of 1983 I started my first job in semiconductor lithography. Now it is 25 years later, and yes, I am feeling just a little bit older, a little bit wiser, and more than a little bit self-absorbed (if you don’t believe me, just check out my website). What I don’t feel like is finished. There are so many interesting problems to work on in lithography! There is so much work yet to do. My dilemma this year is not much different from my dilemmas of the past – of all the interesting things to work on, which one first?

But nonetheless, I think I’ll take this 25 year anniversary as an opportunity to tell a story: just exactly how did I manage to find myself working in the field of lithography? After all, when I was first told I was going to work on lithography, I had to look up the spelling of the word. My path to where I am now is anything but direct. So, in “installment” form over the next few days, I’ll tell the story of how I become a lithographer.